EXCLUSIVE: Netflix has announced an August 13 debut for A Child of My Own (Un Hijo Propio), the new documentary from two-time Oscar nominee Maite Alberdi.
The film examines the strange case of Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza, known as Ale, a young woman in Mexico who felt so much pressure from her husband and in-laws to have a baby that she faked her own pregnancy. While sustaining the ruse for months, Ale arranged with an expectant young mother who didn’t want her child to take that woman’s newborn as her own. That, anyway, is what she later told police. The woman who gave birth insisted she had no arrangement to surrender her infant to Ale.
A Child of My Own screens Friday at the Doc10 festival in Chicago and on Sunday at the San Francisco International Film Festival. It recently screened at the Buenos Aires International Film Festival in Argentina and at Visions du Réel in Nyon, Switzerland after holding its world premiere in February at the Berlin Film Festival. In addition to streaming on Netflix, the documentary will be released in select theaters in the U.S., UK and Mexico.
Armando Espitia as Arturo and Ana Celeste Montalvo as Alejandra in ‘A Child of My Own (Un Hijo Propio).’
Courtesy of Netflix
Alberdi (The Mole Agent, The Eternal Memory) filmed extensive dramatizations for the project, casting Ana Celeste Montalvo Peña as Ale, and Armando Espitia as Ale’s husband, Arturo (he was completely taken in by the scheme and actually thought his wife had carried a baby to term).
“It’s not fiction for me; it’s more like a recreation of her point of view,” Alberdi says of the dramatized sequences. The filmmaker felt an urge to take that creative approach in part because Mexican news media had portrayed Ale in one-dimensional terms – as a baby thief. “It was so organic a way to tell this story because [previously] we were [seeing] only one vision and one version at that point.”
Ana Celeste Montalvo as Alejandra, Armando Espitia as Arturo in ‘A Child of My Own (Un Hijo Propio).’
Courtesy of Luis Antonio Rojas/Netflix
“In this feature-length documentary, Maite Alberdi shows how a simple lie turns into a charade that proves hard to keep up over months, in the eyes of her excited husband and family,” notes a release. “This farce traps Alejandra in an all-consuming simulation that pushes her past the point of no return, triggering a media scandal and making it impossible for her to sustain her lie.”
A Child of My Own continues Alberdi’s relationship with Netflix. The streamer adapted her documentary The Mole Agent into the series A Man on the Inside, starring Ted Danson, which has been renewed for a third season. The director’s 2024 fiction project In Her Place also is streaming on Netflix.
At the Berlin Film Festival, Alberdi told Deadline, “I have so many good experiences with Netflix, of course, starting with A Man on the Inside and I made my first fiction film, In Her Place, with them.” Regarding A Child of My Own, she noted, “It’s a very big film with a mix of big production with actors and with a big crew, and with my way to make documentaries with a small crew. So, it was an ambitious project, but very happy that we can do it with Netflix.”
